Articles

“Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal
of American History, 90 (June 2003): 134-62.
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The dominant theme in the recent historiography of the United States
is the need to extend the boundaries of inquiry beyond the nation state,
to internationalize the subject by placing it in a variety of global
and cosmopolitan settings. The study of immigration and ethnicity ought
to fit comfortably into this framework, but there is considerable confusion
over the appropriate perspective and methodology. By investigating
the global history of one prominent migrant group, the Irish, this
article seeks to delineate an approach suitable for American immigration
history as a whole. That approach combines two perspectives, the diasporic
and the comparative. Diasporic (or “transnational”) history
seeks to transcend the nation state as the primary unit of historical
analysis, searching for reciprocal interactions and sensibilities among
globally scattered communities. Comparative (or “cross-national”)
history examines specific similarities and differences between the
nations or national regions where migrants have settled. Nation-based
comparative history, on its own, cannot capture the fluid and interactive
processes at the heart of migration history; but a strictly transnational
approach tends to underestimate the enduring power of nation states
as the settings in which particular ethnicities emerge. By tracing
the genealogy of the term “diaspora” through its several
incarnations, explaining the nature of cross-national history, and
examining migration, race, and nationalism as three illustrative themes,
this article proposes a flexible new framework for migration history.

In this short article, part of a three-way scholarly forum, I expand
on and modify some of the themes discussed in “Diaspora and Comparison:
The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of American History,
90 (June 2003), 134-62. My approach here is to evaluate the usefulness
of “diaspora” as a category of historical analysis from
two perspectives: as a way of explaining the process of migration from
the homeland, and as a way of explaining the history of disparate communities
of common origin abroad. In the first sense, the utility is limited:
evoking particular forms of historical suffering, including slavery
and genocide, “diaspora” tends to reduce 400 years of Irish
migration history into the single, traumatic but atypical experience
of the famine; in the second, the potential utility is much greater,
especially insofar as diasporic approaches allow historians to discern
communication among and between different settlements abroad, for example
in the realms of religion and nationalism.

*

“Violence, Race, and anti-Irish Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century,” in
J. J. Lee and Marion Casey, eds., Making the Irish American: The History
and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (New York University Press,
2006), 289-301.

Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century United States were well-known
as perpetrators of racism. They were also victims of forms of
prejudice that some historians have characterized as racist. Yet how
could two such radically different historical experiences be subsumed
under the same category? The Irish experience of race in the United
States does not belong in the same category as black slavery or Asian
exclusion. Most of the evidence on anti-Irish “racism,” moreover
consists of words and pictures that reveal a great deal more about
the enemies of the Irish than about how the Irish were treated and
lived their lives. The point of this essay is not to downplay the suffering
of the Irish and the prejudice they endured at nativist hands. Instead,
it is to draw a distinction between cultural prejudice, as
experienced by the Irish, and systematic racial discrimination,
as endured by Chinese Americans and African Americans. In making this
argument, the essay rejects the notion that the Irish arrived in America
without being “fully white” and actively strove to acquire
a “white” racial identity. If race is a way of typecasting
people in order to exploit them, who would voluntarily seek to acquire
a “racial identity”? The Irish, surely, were white on arrival;
if asked to situate themselves in the peculiar racial hierarchy, predicated
on chattel slavery, they had entered, what other identity could they
have chosen? Rather than winning whiteness, they asserted their white
supremacy and assimilated in part through the advantages of race – like
many immigrants who followed them to America.

*

“The Irish in the Empire,” Chapter 4 of Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland
and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004), 90-122.

As well as belonging to a colony at the heart of the British Empire,
Irish people helped conquer, populate, and govern the colonies overseas.
Historians and public commentators have often seen this ambiguous position
vis-à-vis the Empire as a contradiction or even a paradox. But
there is nothing anomalous in one colonized people helping to govern
its homeland or to subjugate and rule other countries elsewhere in
the same empire. Irish people conquered, settled, and administered
other colonies throughout the Empire and took full advantage of the
military, administrative, and commercial opportunities these colonies
had to offer. This essay examines the role of the Irish as migrants,
colonists, officers, soldiers, and missionaries in the Dominions, India,
and Africa, and the significance of this activity both for Ireland
for the Empire. In so doing, it suggests a rich context for broadening
the contours of Irish “national history.”

*

“Nativism, Labor, and Slavery: The Political Odyssey of Benjamin Bannan,
1850-1860,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,
CXVIII (October 1994): 325-61.

This article offers an expanded study, based on new research, of one
of the leading characters in my book Making Sense of the Molly
Maguires,
the nativist newspaper editor Benjamin Bannan. The 1850s was a decade
of political instability and breakdown in the United States. Historians
have debated whether slavery or nativism was at the principal cause
of this crisis. In Bannan’s case, slavery was clearly the key
issue, with its opposite – free labor – under threat by
an unprecedented influx of Irish immigrants. This article demonstrates
that nativism and anti-slavery in the North were complementary parts
of a single, flexible but consistent ideology concerned, above all,
with questions of labor. The two themes were of more or less equal
ideological importance to Bannan in the 1850s, though he attached different
weight to them at different times. Before 1856, nativism predominated
over slavery in his writings; after 1856, anti-slavery came to the
fore, as a logical complement to Bannan's still-vibrant anti-Catholicism.
But anti-slavery sentiment was clearly present in his writings long
before 1856 and anti-immigrant sentiment continued to be present thereafter.
Bannan’s commitment to both causes was reflected in his mounting
concerns about labor and society in the Pennsylvania anthracite region,
in the context of a national political crisis engendered by sectional
tensions over slavery and the arrival of an impoverished and apparently
permanent Irish working class.

Twenty young Irishmen were hanged in the Pennsylvania anthracite region
in the late 1870s, convicted of sixteen murders. Virtually everything
we know about them is based on accounts left by others, and these accounts
are almost invariably hostile. The Mollys themselves left no evidence
of their existence except for a few confessions tailored to the needs
of the prosecution at the trials. The most important source of evidence
was the Pinkerton detective and labor spy, James McParlan, whose employer
Allan Pinkerton published the first major book on the subject, The
Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877). On the basis of these
contemporary accounts, the myth of the Molly Maguires was born: a band
of Irish cut-throats, engaging in violence for its own sake, for money,
or for revenge, who terrorized the anthracite region for more than
a decade before they were finally brought to justice by the Pinkerton
Detective Agency and the Reading Railroad. The central rhetorical element
of this myth was the denial of history and the creation of a static
world, closed to the possibility of change; and, as a corollary, belief
in essential, timeless categories of human nature, like goodness and
badness. If a single theme dominated the Molly Maguire myth, it was
the absence of any motivation for the assassinations of which the Mollys
stood accused: the killings reflected a natural Irish propensity toward
violence and savagery. Examining a wide range of literary sources,
this article traces the rise of the Molly Maguire myth in the Allan
Pinkerton’s work, its high points in dime-novel fiction and in
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley
of Fear (1915), and its eventual dissolution in the historiography
of the 1930s and the movie “The Molly Maguires” (Paramount
Pictures, 1970).

Accounts of the Molly Maguire episode in the anthracite fields of
nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, where twenty Irishmen were hanged
for sixteen murders, used to portray the violence as a transatlantic
extension of the age-old sectarian conflict between Irish Catholics
and British Protestants. Among other things, these accounts ignored
the fact that the Catholic Church excommunicated members of agrarian
societies in Ireland, and the Molly Maguires attacked clergymen and
church buildings. In Pennsylvania, the Church continued to condemn
the Molly Maguires for their secrecy and violence. But the tension
between the Church and the Mollys was part of a broader cultural conflict
between metropolitan and rural (or, in immigrant America, working-class)
Irish Catholics, known as the “devotional revolution.” On
both sides of the Atlantic the hierarchy sought to impose more orthodox
beliefs and practice and to root out older forms of traditional or “folk” religion.
As impoverished, alienated, Irish-speaking migrants from the most isolated
parts of Ireland (especially West Donegal), the Molly Maguires were
just the sort of Catholics the hierarchy targeted in the “devotional
revolution.” While the hierarchy was unanimous in its condemnation
of the Molly Maguires, some local clergymen sympathized with them in
the late 1870s, when they began to suspect that innocent men were being
executed. This article examines the broad social and cultural conflict
between the Catholic Church and the Molly Maguires in the 1860s and
1870s, by tracing the hierarchy’s evolving position on labor
issues and the thoughts and actions of clergymen on the ground (who
played a central and deeply ambivalent role in the execution ceremonies).
The outcome of the religious and cultural conflict examined here was
a more restricted, more respectable definition of Irish-American identity
with reformed Catholicism as its central ingredient. This classic
definition of Irish-American ethnicity has been familiar ever since,
but rather than being foreordained, it was the product of contestation
within the ethnic community and between that community and the wider
American society.